Opening reception Thursday, June 12, 2014 · 6–8 pm
In places with marked contrast between night and day, where decline and deterioration exist whether inhabited or uninhabited, there are those who set out to explore issues of change. Kate Protage takes her photography of the city at night and evolves it into moody, urbanscape oil paintings; while Dan Hawkins is well known for his photography of our urban, decaying centers. Kate’s work has a love/hate relationship with the cities she has lived in. There are places with two worlds that exist in the same physical space depending on the time of day: streets that appear gritty, dirty, and depressing by day turn into an environment infused with a strange kind of lush, dark beauty and romance at night. Dan’s photos often deal with the dual themes of memory and decay. Beginning with empty houses and discarded water towers, he has gone on to record EPA Superfund sites, chemical factories, decaying ballrooms, deserted nuclear facilities, crumbling hotels, and derelict mental hospitals and jails. He describes these as a “landscape of the soul.”